Calculators

I've been working on a series of Excel Spreadsheets that anyone in the community energy sector can use to calculate what they need to know. They are not fully polished, but I've published them here and if you find something not working, please reach out and I will fix it.

• Solar Calculator - ever been frustrated that you don't have the precise hourly solar data to match your load data? look no further. If you don't need a precise year then renewables ninja or the Global Solar atlas are also good sources of data.

• Load and Flexibility Calculator - Still relying on State government breakdowns of energy consumption that haven't kept up with the move to get off gas? This spreadsheet based on the federal government's Residential Baseline Survey gets you started on how your community uses energy, how it could change in future and how to show the flows and energy balances in a Sankey diagram.

• Load model - I developed this for my project in Venus Bay but it is simple for anyone to use. It allowed me to model daily energy use of the whole community in ways that captured the solar output and the heating and cooling response. This is the sort of thing we need to talk knowledgeably to our communities about where our future energy consumption and generation needs to be heading. Not linked here, but let me know if you are interested in using it.

• Tariff Calculator - We can't truthfully analyse the value of local energy unless we know how centralised energy should be priced. The pricing system at the moment is riddled with perverse price signals and incentives. This calculator allows you to explore how things should be, while also appreciating the level of choice the current arrangement affords and the choices our regulators could be making to allocate resources more fairly.

• Backup Calculator  - coming soon. How do we know when backup energy would be more valuably provided by local generators, local batteries, or local load flexibility?

If you can't wait - send me an email and I'll send you the working-but-not-pretty version.